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This Idea Stinks
Odorono!
By David "Spam Me and Die" Fiedler
It really stinks.
You can check it out yourself, but I think the regular readers of this column will agree. A couple of people (in California, of course, but not the part of California I live in, thank you!) have come up with the idea of a peripheral called iSmell which is designed to attach to your computer and exude specific odors based on software control.
I don't even want to speculate what the porno sites are going to do with this technology, seeing as how Wired magazine was unclassy enough to put a scratch-n-sniff armpit on their front cover story about the company, Digiscents. Imagine people coming up with spam with built-in "skunk bombs". And can you visualize what will happen when your Windows machine goes into a Dr. Watson crash-and-burn random error frenzy?
It's bad enough when my inkjet printer runs out of a particular color. I can just see calling up the local Staples and asking for a refill on mercaptan and rose oil.
The scary thing is, the company doesn't seem to be thinking in terms of this real-world stuff. They think they're going to be helping e-commerce by selling flowers and perfume. On their site, they wax rhapsodic about how odors were used in movies in a process called Odorama. Well, I happened to go to that movie, and all I will say is that some of the odors I experienced were way too realistic...in fact, 18 years later, I still gag at the thought. But I should have known better, as I had seen other John Waters movies.
Let's keep the net the net and not try to make it too close to real life. There are enough people who are having trouble telling the difference even now!
-- D. Fiedler
David Fiedler is Editor-in-Chief of WebDeveloper.com, and his opinions are definitely his own.
Last modified: Sun Oct 17 02:34:50 EDT 1999
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